Taxing the Church

Edward Zelinsky’s Taxing the Church reminds us that the tax relationship between houses of worship and government is far more complex than the conventional language of “separation of church and state” would suggest. (I will follow Zelinsky’s lead in using “church” as a synonym for “houses of worship” in this review.) Much of that complexity is a product of the dispersed powers of government and the murkiness of what counts as “religious.” While the IRS tax code structures some aspects of taxation of churches, the key institutional arrangement is federalism, which results in tax burdens on churches as varied as the states themselves. States often diverge in their responses to issues on the edges of church work where it is not clear that activities or modes of ownership are a core feature of religious mission. How to handle sales taxes on retail sales of books or videos? At what point is church-owned property that is not a sanctuary—a parsonage, for example—too distant from essential faith-based functions to exempt the property from a tax? Zelinsky provides both an extensive survey of these subtle contours of church-state law and a careful analysis of why they matter.

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